For years Stephanie Bairstow was afraid to step outside her front door - instead she hid away in her home and spent days in bed through fear of opening her eyes.

The 34-year-old mother-of-two from Lidget Green knows only too well what it is like to live with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder because it has been part of her life since her teens.

She bathed up to seven times a night and hoarded things.

But now she is finally learning to live without the condition, which causes sufferers to feel compelled to repeatedly carry out tasks like washing hands, cleaning homes or hoarding.

And Stephanie is hoping to help other sufferers through her first-hand knowledge of the condition.

Stephanie has beaten the disorder and trained to be a leader for TOP (Triumph Over Phobia). The organisation, whose head office is in Bath, helped her through her ordeal and she is helping the group by setting up the charity's first support group in West Yorkshire.

Stephanie is now seeking premises within Bradford from where she can run the support service, which would preferably be rent-free as TOP is a charity.

"I want to help other people because I know there are people who are sat at home with this problem and I know what hell they are living in," said Stephanie.

For the past five years she has been undergoing behaviour therapy with TOP and is starting to see changes - she is now able to go out of the house. One of the most important things to Stephanie is she can support her rugby-playing son.

She believes she has had the condition for most of her life and started when she refused to go to school.

Her parents divorced when she was five and she had always shared a very close bond with her mum and sister. In fact Stephanie believes that is why she didn't want to go to school - because she couldn't bear to be separated from her family.

"I was never without my mum, my sister or my dog - I didn't want to be alone," said Stephanie. "I don't think I realised how bad it had got until about ten years ago. My home was just so full of empty jars and bottles."

At that time she lived in a four-bedroomed house but her need to hoard things grew to such an extent that she had to have a shed to store it all.

Apart from hoarding things Stephanie also had an obsession about cleanliness and would bathe seven times a night. Seven is a figure which may stem from her childhood as she recalls touching seven lamp-posts in a row so nothing bad would happen to her mother.

But this later crept into her own family life when she had her own children - Dane, 13, and 16-year-old Toni.

"It got worse when I had my son because the cleanliness and contamination started coming in," said Stephanie.

And her behaviour started to affect her children's lives - she would stay in bed all day and not take them to school because she didn't want to step outside her front door, and eventually her daughter became her carer.

"My daughter has lost her childhood," Stephanie said regretfully.

Toni, who left school at 13 and is now training to be a hairdresser, also suffers mildly from the condition - she has panic attacks and like her mum didn't want to go to school.

The condition has also rubbed off on Dane, a rugby player with Clayton Amateur Rugby League Club who has just been selected to play for Bradford Schools, because he was petrified of going to school.

But husband Trevor is determined to nip it in the bud and is keen that his son will overcome his fear. Stephanie doesn't work now but when she did she found the condition interfered with her jobs.

She took on cleaning work at night so when she went out it was dark and she always took the children with her. She also did bar work, and the couple she worked for were understanding.

At one time she and the family ran a pub in Great Horton but she still couldn't get away from the condition - even the regulars knew when she was having a bad day.

"They knew if all the bottles were straight I wasn't well," she said. "But I was good at my job with the cleaning and polishing - I had a very clean bar!"

Eventually the condition took its toll on Stephanie and she overdosed on the anti-depressants which had been prescribed to her to help control the depression she was suffering from.

Stephanie found her solace in TOP and the book which she calls her Bible - Living in Fear by Professor Isaac Marks, a consultant psychiatrist at Maudsley Hospital in London - which deals with understanding and coping with anxiety.

Part of behaviour therapy involves self-exposure treatment - setting yourself goals which you have to achieve.

A spokesman for TOP, which was founded in 1987 by a woman with a fear of flying, said: "We are very excited about it because Stephanie is a wonderful lady."

If you can offer premises or if you want to know more about OCD contact Stephanie via TOP UK on 01225 330353.